Roundworm Eyed Doll

Pages

Monday, 18 July 2016

The recent EU referendum in the UK has drawn a great deal of attention to voters who had previously been ignored. Communities left behind by the 21st Century, especially in the North and East of England, voted strongly to leave. The referendum result will do nothing at all to help these people, as the economy slows and pressure is put on government finances, but it is still important to consider what can be done to address their problems.

One problem is inequality of wealth. In theory, this is simple to solve, we just give people money. If we don’t have enough money to give people, this is unfortunate, but long term growth, trade and neoliberalism will mean there is more to go round. This misses the bigger picture though. People are very poor at identifying disparities in wealth, their perceptions are very far from reality, and so addressing this is unlikely to allay frustrations. When people talk about inequality in society, they are really talking about the hierarchy of status.

Status, like pornography, is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. It is not the same as wealth: lotto lout Michael Carroll was rich, but not at all high status. It’s also not the same as class: Alan Sugar is working class in his background and mannerisms, but still high status. Status is not the same as intelligence: Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a very intelligent man, but is still clearly a loser. Status is also not the same as power: Andrea Leadsom could have become one of the most powerful people in the world, but will never be high status. It relates to all of these things, but really, status is positional respect. It is the esteem in which you are held by society, especially by those who are themselves held in high esteem.

Redistributing wealth does little to address inequality of status, and may even make the problem worse. While making money yourself confers status, being given it doesn’t. In fact, being able to afford to give a handout is a costly signal of your own strength, whereas accepting a handout incurs reputational costs. The hierarchy is reinforced. In the past, the government has managed to work around this by disguising the handouts. They use white lies like the contributory principle to justify tax credits and pensions, or more roundabout ways, like the Thatcher government’s subsidised sell off of council housing. While this works well, people living off the state without realising it don’t tend to vote in favour of redistribution, and erroneously take out their frustrations on even lower status people for whom it is more obvious.

---

Disparities in status across society, I think, becoming larger and more obvious. Fifty years ago, talented people from poorer backgrounds were often trapped there. While this was bad for them, it had some good effects. The brightest and best create a social surplus, in terms of organising informal institutions, and therefore help build a sense of community. In even the most deprived areas, there were smart leaders. Status, therefore, was more evenly distributed between geographic and socioeconomic groups, with local hierarchies and high status role models.

Now, these people leave at 18 for university. While this is great for the individual, they are able to escape their relatively deprived background, and good for society, as they will likely contribute more broadly, it may not be good for their home town. Meritocracy siphons off the brightest young working class people and makes them middle class, with university teaching them necessary etiquette. Most, once they’ve seen what the rest of the world has to offer, don’t return. ‘Elites’, therefore, are drawn from many sections of society, but are united by high levels of intelligence and education. Their friend groups are elite-only, with the internet helping they to secede from the rest of society, wherever they are in the world. The social surplus they create is captured and kept within their circle. Society, therefore, becomes more starkly sorted by levels of status.

You can’t grant status from above, it has to be seen as earned. Directly redistributing status is really difficult, and may be one of the most important long term questions for human civilisation.

---

To really understand how to solve this, we have to take a detour and explore the clowning culture of the Pueblo Indians in the southwestern United States. Here, clowns take place in periodic rituals, which occupy a space between a circus show and a religious experience. Members of the community watching are systematically picked on and humiliated. The performers simulate copulation in the streets, bowls of urine are thrown around, people are hit with phallic objects, kidnapped and thrown in the rivers. The religious functions of the ceremony are lampshaded and mocked as it is happening.

There are two ways in this relates to our theme of status. The first is that the clowns are anonymous, hiding behind masks and outfits. They therefore have no reputations of their own to lose or gain. Once wearing the clown outfits, participants exist outside of hierarchies, and can’t be held responsible for their actions afterwards. The second is that their actions are redistributive. They are equal opportunity offenders, targeting everyone from children to tribal chiefs. This is levelling, as the chief has far more status to lose. The controlled bout of anarchy also holds a discipline function. Perceived miscreants can be targeted, and the event shows how society can collapse once people stop following rules.

The brexit vote has a similar function. Its goal is not to materially improve the lot of the working man, but to humiliate his betters. Now everyone has been brought down to his level, grappling with vast systems they don’t understand or control. A supreme act of political and economic vandalism to upend the UK’s status hierarchies. Nigel Farage isn’t a potential leader, he doesn’t have the capacity, and has never been elected into the formal hierarchies of Westminster. Instead he’s a clown, and the voters chose to hit David Cameron with a massive, inflatable, penis-shaped slap-stick.

This energy needs to be channelled in a safer way. If the people are going to elect governments, they must have a better outlet for dispensing humiliation, otherwise they vote to dole it out and do immense damage to the country in the process. The nearest modern day equivalent to the clowns are obviously comedians, but this offers us little help. The vast majority of stand ups working today on UK TV are offensively unchallenging to the prevailing political order, enforcing dull liberal social norms, but doing little to seriously humiliate those in power or redistribute status. Unfortunately I’m not able to offer any more substantive proposals, but if there is hope, it lies in the trolls.

Sunday, 26 June 2016

It's a given that the Independent Online is total garbage, but I've seen a lot of people sharing this graphic and I think it needs to be corrected for the sake of public information.

The graphic, originally taken from this Lord Ashcroft post, was posted and shared under the title 'What Brexit Voters Really Think', and purports to show the attitudes of leave voters, but it is extremely misleading. It displays, for example, the voting patterns of people who think the internet is bad. This is not an especially useful statistic, far more important is the actual opinions of people voted leave versus those who voted remain. We care a lot less about the views of people who hate the internet than the views of brexit voters.The biggest problem here is that the number of people who think that the internet is a bad thing is very small. Only 5% of survey respondents thought this, and 71% of thesevoted leave. The graphic presents the data as if people who disliked this internet were a large part of the leave vote, and I have seen many people across social media interpreting it this way. This is completely untrue. Overall, 71% of leave voters think the internet is good, and 7% think it is bad, compared to 80% and 3% for remain voters, a very minor difference.

I've taken the data from from the original Ashcroft poll here, and plotted it to show the reality of what the voters from both sides think, and it is still interesting*. Opinions on capitalism don't vary much between camps, furthering the idea that the referendum didn't cut across traditional political lines. Views of the internet are also not very different between groups, everyone likes it. Leave voters don't even seem to hate globalisation that much, though they're more against it than the remainers. The biggest differences, perhaps predictably, are on immigration and multiculturalism, which may pose a problem for those on the winning team who are now trying to claim the referendum wasn't about this...

*Numbers don't add up to 100%, as some people were neutral or didn't know.

Tuesday, 21 June 2016

Disclaimer - this article was written and submitted for publication before the Jo Cox shooting on Thursday. It's a bit out of date now, but still worth reading.

In a referendum, the general public will answer anything but the question put in front of them. In 2011, Britain declared overwhelmingly that they hated Nick Clegg. In 2014, Scotland declared unconvincingly that they didn’t hate the Tories quite enough. In 2016, Britain will declare whether or not they hate 2016.

On the surface, the referendum may not change very much. The most likely single outcome, a Norway style free trade agreement, would lead to little change in the long term. Following some initial instability, we would return to free trade and open borders, exchanging small amounts of influence for small amounts of flexibility. Britain will have some amount of extra money, which can be spent offsetting transition costs and replacing existing EU spending. The rest can be a raindrop in the municipal NHS swimming pool.

Despite this, however, I think that it is important to look at the tones of the two campaigns for clues to the future. What people are voting on is not a very specific policy question, but for one of two general themes and directions for the future. On the one hand, Britain the market state ruled by a technocratic elite, pro globalisation, openness and a nebulous idea of progress. On the other hand, Britain the nation state ruled by its own people, rejecting the neoliberal consensus in favour of sovereignty and common sense.

There are those on the leave side who argue in favour of leaving in order to increase Commonwealth migration, and negotiate even more open trade agreements with the rest of the world than are possible inside the EU. While these would be theoretically possible, in this scenario we live in a country in which the majority of people voted for the leave campaign. That same leave campaign spent the last month telling anyone who would listen that we must leave the EU in order to escape the ravenous hordes of Turks ready to invade, and that free trade agreements prevent us from nationalising the railways. I don’t believe most of the people in charge of the campaign agree with these arguments, but if they’re the ones that win, politicians will have to take note of. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, opportunists who like to cast themselves as open to the world, have summoned egregores they may be unable to put down.

This all ties into a large realignment we’re seeing in politics across the west. In the past, our political axis ran from right to left, at one end, faith, flag, family & free markets, and at the other end socialism, multiculturalism and social progress. These coalitions are starting to break down. I have written before about the alliance of social justice and neoliberalism, and in many ways the brexit campaign is its antithesis. Socially and economically protectionist, communitarian and conservative. The remain side may be best described as a coalition of the ascendent. Young voters, the upper middle class, ethnic minorities and growing cities. Their opponents are those in decline, the retired and socially dislocated, white working class people, and those left behind by a global knowledge economy.

This is never more apparent than in the two sides approaches to expertise. The remain side proudly trumpet their endorsements from almost all working economists, and yet leave are unfazed. They don’t trust the experts any more, because they don’t trust anyone. Experts are always on side of the culture wars, and have been powerless to prevent the decline in their communities over the last half century. It’s no surprise that when someone offers to burn the world down, they jump at the chance.

The Tories straddle this new divide, and therefore it’s not immediately obvious who are the more right wing. The nationalism and immigration restriction of the eurosceptics is of the right, but remainers talk far more about the virtues of markets and traditionally conservative cautiousness. This realignment leads to the strange sight of Tory ministers who spent the past six years cutting spending invoking the language of class warfare.

Labour meanwhile are left nowhere. A combination of socialism and liberalism straddles both, but has little appeal outside younger voters at the moment. Their traditional working class base has abandoned the official pro-remain position, and even Jeremy Corbyn seems to have little interest in it. It isn’t surprising, he’s on neither side of the biggest and most polarising debate in most people’s lifetimes.

This new divide was already forming, and we can also see it in America with the rise of Donald Trump, but the referendum campaign is laying waste to old coalitions and forming new ones. It may even worsen the causes of the problem, there is research suggesting that the more extreme the levels of political polarisation in a country, the lower the levels of social trust, which can lead to an erosion of civil society, as more and more people retreat into their own bubbles and abandon the public sphere.

I don’t know how Britain will vote this week, it’s too close to call, but it’s a vote on far more than our relationship with Europe. Voters are deciding what sort of country they want to live in, globalisation versus nationalism, neoliberalism versus paleoconservatism, a country ruled by the experts, or one ruled by the people.

Tuesday, 16 February 2016

Next week junior doctors will be taking their nuclear option and starting a series of complete strikes. While their previous walkouts have left emergency and critical care cover in place, this time they won’t. I wonder how many, when voting on the strike ballot back in November realised how far this would go, and how many would change their minds now, considering risks to patient safety and to their own public support.

The BMA is probably the most powerful union in the country. Its members are well educated, respected by the public, photogenic and middle class, and crucially people don’t think of it as a trade union. Trade unions are full of burly working class men covered in coal dust. When doctors start agitating, social media is filled with middle class solidarity, petitions and opinion pieces shared by people who would never dream of doing the same for striking tube workers. Indeed, a popular graphic directly compared hard-working junior doctors to those feckless and overpaid tube workers.

Current pay distribution for doctors. Left three peaks are for juniors.

Doctors therefore start with from an extraordinary position of strength compared to other unions, and as such the BMA has had great success in the past at achieving its goals through soft power, making public statements and quietly lobbying without the need for a real strike. The union has therefore managed to preserve the relatively privileged position of doctors rather well. In spite of often understaffed hospitals, they have successfully limited places at UK medical schools. There is no shortage of capable people willing to be doctors, thousands more bright teenagers apply for medical school than are accepted, but if the supply increased, wages would fall. This is a completely reasonable thing for the BMA to do, all unions protect their members’ interests, that’s their job, but we shouldn’t see it as any different or more high minded just because it’s for middle class professionals. Equally, it is the job of the government to get the best deal for the taxpayer, and spending more money on wages for doctors isn’t necessarily the ideal use of scarce NHS funding.

With regards the actual substance of the deal, the gulf between the BMA and the government is actually rather small. The final sticking point was over how many Saturdays junior doctors would have to work before they were paid extra. The government offered extra money if it were more than one saturday a month, the BMA wanted all Saturdays to be paid a premium. Had the government conceded here, they would have called off all industrial action.

Since then, however, junior doctors on social media have been whipped up into a frenzy. As a medical student, I’ve watched this first hand both in person and on social media. Anyone not fully on board is subject to tirades of abuse by an army of medics utterly convinced of their own righteousness. For the first time in their lives, the class swots are getting to be rebellious, and they’re enjoying it rather too much. Facebook is filled with posts from doctors and medical students warning each other not to believe the mainstream media lies, retreating into a conspiratorial mindset more often associated with Communists, Scottish Nationalists and Donald Trump fans. Once this happens, it’s only a matter of time before they lose public respect, and I worry that they’re too far gone to back down now. There is even some suggestion that their leader, Johann Malwana, realises things have gone too far. He tried to exempt children’s healthcare from the strikes, but was overruled. Has he unleashed something he can no longer control?

Most statements around the strikes are wrapped up in very high minded rhetoric about protecting the NHS from private companies, often including a conspiracy theory where the government deliberately tries to crash the NHS so they can sell it off to private sector cronies. This seems very unconvincing to me. While many doctors moaned about the NHS reforms of 2012, they did not strike then. Instead, that same year, they went on strike over changes to their pensions. The last time before that, in the 1970s, it was over the right to private work for consultants. Again, these are all totally reasonable things to be concerned about, but they are matters of industrial relations and pay, not a crusade to save the NHS.

The doctors have also talked a lot about patient safety. This is a sensible decision to get the public onside. People are far more sympathetic to saving lives than increasing the pay of someone earning well over the median wage. Many previous studies, however have looked into doctors working hours. Ironically, these were responding to concerns at the time that limiting doctors hours were dangerous. Old school consultants who had to work 90 hour weeks as juniors felt that limitations imposed on working hours would mean understaffing, as well as a lack of experience by the time the juniors became consultants themselves, which would harm patient care. The evidence does not back this up, with bothpublished meta analyses finding that there is not enough evidence to say patient safety is made either worse or better by any changes in working hours.

In the last few weeks I have seen several doctors and medical students on facebook approvingly sharing this. It argues, correctly, that there is nothing to stop individual NHS trusts from negotiating their own contract settlements with the doctors who work there. This would be very appealing to the strikers, who presumably think their own trusts would offer them better pay and conditions than the Department of Health, or at least stick with the old contracts. I'm not aware of the BMA making a statement on this yet, but they have been very wary of it in the past. For a union to have negotiating power, it needs to have a monopoly on the supply of labour. Allowing each NHS trust to negotiate separately would fundamentally undermine this.

Individual pay negotiation and the breakup of large public sector unions combines well with the government's agenda of breaking up the centralised NHS. NHS trusts would be able to experiment with different pay structures on a local basis, and maybe even compete against each other to attract the best junior doctors onto their staff. The Department of Health would no longer have to negotiate with the BMA, in fact the BMA would essentially have ceased to exist for the purposes of pay negotiation. This may be a good thing for the country, but it would hardly fit the aims of the strikers, they’d be cutting off their nose to spite their face.

None of this is to say that doctors shouldn’t try to improve their working conditions or pay. They should, however, be careful with how they proceed. This is a simple contract negotiation, albeit one that has become very hostile. Though the BMA have a lot of power, this power is vulnerable. Doctors are one of the few professions left with the respect of the public. Once a profession loses this respect, it doesn’t come back. Spending all their public sympathy on endless strikes over what is in the grand scheme of things a small issue is dangerous in the long run, and could jeopardise the future of the profession.

Monday, 8 February 2016

Last week social justice had a victory and it had a loss. In Oxford, it was announced that Rhodes would not fall. In the States,Barbie got a feminist makeover, meaning that she gets fat and dyes her hair blue.

Obviously I don’t think all feminists look like this, but Mattel do.

Both these are relatively unimportant issues, but why did one succeed when the other fail? The most obvious difference is that the former was working against neoliberalism, while the latter worked with it. Rich donors wanted to keep the Rhodes statue, so it stayed. Barbie being a feminist means a huge number of different dolls for kids to buy, or, maybe more likely, for their right on parents to buy for them, and plenty of money for Mattel. Social justice causes are far more likely to succeed when allied with capitalism, and fail when opposed to it.

This may sound counterintuitive, since those agitating for social justice ostensibly rail against the evils of neoliberalism every day. The link between the two, however, was first pointed out to me by Ben Southwood, who has now decided that it will be called the Southwood Thesis. (You only really get to name one eponymous thing, Ben went for his pretty early in life.) While some social justice causes may ostensibly work against capitalism, these tend to fail, and the successful ones usually push society in a marketised direction.

There may be many different mechanisms through which the link works, and for the sake of exploration I’ve tried to list them here. I’m not confident in them all being real, whether they are all appropriate to include under this label, or whether they are all separate phenomena, but have tended towards including as much as possible. Equally, I’m taking rather generous definitions of both social justice and neoliberalism. Like porn, you know them when you see them. Neoliberalism is seen as the dominant ideology of the modern west, predominantly market based but with space for some government involvement in the economy, technocratic and sceptical of any overt ideological statements.. By social justice I don’t just mean tumblr ‘SJW’ stuff, but generally the post ‘68 consensus and rejection of faith, flag and family traditions in favour of self expression values.

---

1. Social Justice as Distraction From Economic Justice

This is a point that has often been made by the old left. Essentially, post the collapse of the soviet union, radicals lost all faith in socialism, and instead pivoted onto identity politics, which is substantially less challenging to the economic system. This requires us to assume that campaigning on social issues replaces campaigning on economic issues, but I think this is reasonably likely, you can only go on so many marches, and donations to some political organisations will divert funds from others. While the left are distracted by gay marriage and language policing each other, the corporatist government can get on with privatisation and cutting taxes. Anecdotally, this may even be tacitly encouraged, with big business giving money to activists to keep them safely occupied with unimportant problems.

For a good statement of this position, see everything Fredrik DeBoer has ever written.

People may only tolerate a certain number of deviations from their own views before they start casting them out of polite society. This is known in social psychology as idiosyncracy credits. Holding liberal social views, therefore, may provide licence for right wing economic views. While they may look like naughty right wingers on some issues, they’re not that sort of right winger, and can still get invited to the best dinner parties.

3. Left-Fusionism

Fusionism was a right wing tactic that began to take shape in the 1950s, and finally reached its peak with Reagan. The idea was that right wingers who favoured a small state, generally not a popular idea with the general public, should make common cause with social conservatives in order to piggyback on the popularity of their ideas. It may be that many fusionists never really had any passion for social issues at all, but merely saw them as a useful means to gain power. As the electorate becomes more liberal, however, we may see the opposite.

The current mainstream of the democratic party in the states may be an example of this. Hillary Clinton clearly doesn’t care much about social justice issues, having been anti gay marriage only a couple of years ago. She is, however, focusing a large amount of campaigning energy on it, and sticking rainbows on anything that moves. This may be seen as a way of gaining popularity among the left wing base for her fundamentallyneoliberal economic agenda. This has become very noticeable over the course of the Democrat presidential race. Many supporters of Bernie Sanders have made these exact criticisms of Clinton, and been on the receiving end of a large backlash from media elites, leading to a fun mini war over the existence of probably fictional‘Berniebros’, young male socialist trolls insufficiently interested in social justice. If you don’t support capitalism, you’re a misogynist!

With right fusionists fighting left fusionists, the whole system is neoliberal, social issues are merely a false war to distract people from this. No matter who wins, the market wins!This is very similar to point one, with the distinction being that there social justice issues unconsciously distract people who who are sincerely left wing, whereas here they are used consciously by those who aren’t. It is distinct from point two in that it is used as an explicit means to win power, rather than just to placate friends.

4. Social Justice as Marketing Strategy

This is probably the most noticeable process. Corporations want to attract the key 18-40 demographic, with disposable time and income. Socially liberal ideas are most popular among the young and wealthy. The combination is natural. It was perhaps most notable during Obergefell v. Hodges, when almost every company going had a rainbow profile picture. Even more radically, we see Beyonce performing a black panther inspired routine, in order to sell her new range of merchandiseand records.

Please don't commodify this thing that just got commodified in front of a hundred million people on live tv to sell records.

This can sometimes go the other way. Social conservatives flocked to Chick-fil-A after their CEO backed traditional marriage, but most companies don’t much care about the demographic who support this, and it’s possible these people are less vulnerable to gauche political posturing as a marketing tactic. Social justice advertising is mostly propagated through social media, where the audience is younger and more liberal, so this may just be targeted marketing rather than a more general strategy. More interestingly, companies may use social activism and boycotts against their rivals as an addition to more usual price and quality based competition.

The trend has also been noticed by the left, with more radical campaigners criticising it as pinkwashing. This doesn’t necessarily reflect a fundamental compatibility between social justice and neoliberalism. It is simply a tendency for companies to back winners, and at the moment liberals are on the ascendency. If their advertising has any impact on the public’s political views, corporations likely just speed any existing bandwagon they can find.

5. Markets Don’t Like Discrimination

In a market economy, it will rarely pay to discriminate. Minority groups are a large market, so refusing to sell to them will result in lower profits. If an employer pays black workers less than equally productive white workers, it would make sense for a competitor to poach them. Any company with incentives other than maximising its profit will in the long run lose out to those who do. This was laid out by the uber-neoliberal Gary Becker. Equally, many of the strategies of activists working towards social justice ends takes the form of boycotts against companies they dislike, a fundamentally market based method of effecting change, and maybe one of the most effective. Even in the recent fights over free speech and abuse online, we see a similar thing, as activists use the corporate control of public fora to argue that restrictions on expression aren’t impingements on people’s rights. The people who run corporations are far more open to liberal arguments than the general voter, and so this may be an easier target for social change than via the ballot box.

6. Labour Force Size and Mobility

The adoption of liberal government policy and social norms is often good for big business. This is an argument that has been made by some conservatives in the past, but few still exist, with the vast majority of supposed conservatives being fully signed up to a neolibral agenda. The most obvious of these is probably immigration. The left promote immigration partly because it can lead to big increases in welfare for some of the world’s poorest people, and partly because they want to rub those racist pleb's noses in a bit of diversity. Both noble goals. The right, meanwhile, support it because it brings in a ready supply of low cost labour, bidding down wages at the bottom of society, and also increasing economic growth. This, however, may erode the social trust upon which traditional, non market, institutions depended. In addition, an increasingly diverse society may reduce support for redistributive government policies. People might be willing to pay for a large welfare state if it is supporting people similar to them, but less keen if it's for a 'bunch of migrants' with whom they have less in common, both culturally and genetically.

Equally, women entering the workplace is a noble liberal cause, promoting independence and freedom, as well as leading to large increases in the size of the workforce and so helping boost economic growth. It also led to the end of the single earner nuclear family unit that was dominant throughout most of the latter part of the last millennium. As people strive to compete in the economic sphere, through longer working hours, this home life is eroded, and as workers move more in search of jobs and opportunities, the local institutions based on shared history and ties to the area break down. People are less likely to be involved in a local community when they’re only there for a year until they next move jons. A socially liberal society may simply be much more amenable to capitalism.

7. Social Justice Opening New Markets

Liberal social norms in many areas take what are traditionally informal, private realms, and bring them into the public sphere. As more women enter the workforce, childcare can be increasingly marketised, it becomes a job, rather than part of home life. Though no extra work is being done, this can show up in those sweet sweet GDP figures. Likewise, a big recent social justice cause has been sex work, where again private interactions between people become market based interactions between a buyer and seller. We are constantly told by progressive that we need totalk more about sex. Again, the borders of the home and bedroom, previously sacred, private and hidden from the tentacles of public discourse and the market, are broken down, allowing us all to buy lots of sex toys.

Perhaps less obviously, sexual liberation as well as the breakdown of traditional social institutions like the church, have led to a far more open, competitive and liquid dating market. Business have been able to step into this niche, and therefore profit off social interactions that were previously closed off to that, through online dating sites and apps such as tinder. If, as looks likely, polyamoury, becomes the next frontier, I'm sure there'll be an app for that too.

8. Social Justice Values as Market Values

In the past, status in society was gained through ones family, and wealth was mostly inherited land for the aristocracy. Society valued stability, hierarchy and self discipline. Capitalism does not value these things. Success is based on creative destruction, novelty, and self expression. The people we idolise are self made millionaires, successful musicians and actors. We compete to keep up with the Jones' on the things we wear, the things we eat, even the opinions we hold, always looking for an edge in the marketplace of cool, and there's always someone to sell you the latest cool hot takes.

---

This is all no coincidence, modern social justice and economic liberalism are phylogenetically linked, stemming from puritanical protestantism and opposed to traditionalist catholicism. They've both come a long way, but share a common individualism and commitment to progress and change.

It seems possible to me that the 21st century could see a political realignment along these lines, but currently the parties are split right down the middle. The 'metropolitan liberals', (Miliband, Umunna, Thornberry) arefacing off against its more conservative working class base, some of who now seem to be defecting to Ukip. Corbynis almost totally irrelevant to this fight, being unnacceptable to much of both factions, and tries desperately to hold things together. Equally, the Conservatives seem split between a relatively liberal leadership, and a conservative base. The EU referendum will serve as a proxy war for this fight within all parties.

In America, similarly, both parties are split down the middle. The left sees the Queen of social justice/neoliberal fusionism facing off against Bernie Sanders slightly crustier politics. Likewise, DonaldTrump represents this same division. While on social issues, he is determinedly unprogressive, on economic ones, he looks far more of a poujadist than a business conservative. On the other hand, while more mainstream candidates like Marco Rubio may take many socially conservative positions, in a similar way to Clinton, they represent the triumph of the market state over the nation state, and theCloud over the Land.There are plenty of ways you might react to this fundamental compatibility between free markets and social justice. A modern liberaltarian may revel in it, a traditional conservative sees the unmasked face of cthulhu and everything he fears. A left winger sees that their whole life's work may have been in vain. I marvel at it. A memeplex so versatile and pervasive it governs our every social interaction, twists all opposition to it into support. Neoliberalism is pretty great, and it will succeed no matter what you do, so stop complaining and enjoy the ride.